It made me think we should have a hurricane threat every weekend. It was nice being able to cross the street without having multi-ton vehicles bearing down on me for no other reason than spite. Having no one trying to go anywhere in a frantic hurry was a good thing.

It was instructive to watch drivers and pedestrians negotiate normally
signalized intersections with the power off — when does the motorist
decide to yield? —

I don’t know about New York State, but where I was taught to drive, when the traffic signals are offline, the intersection becomes a four-way stop.

“In contrast, those with only one means of travel — such as drivers in upstate New York, where floods rendered hundreds of roads and bridges impassable — are stuck at home.”

Even with an extensive transit network these residents would be stuck at home.  Impassable roads and bridges (and also train tracks),  as well as wide spread power outages, affect all modes of travel .  Transit would not provide a viable option in these circumstance.

You have to understand that people in rural areas (and not all of upstate New York is rural, by the way), unless they’ve just arrived, realize that not being able to get everywhere you want to go, every time you want to get there, is part of life.  If it snows hard enough you either have to dig yourself out or wait a couple days for someone else to.  If it rains and washes out the road, you need to be prepared to eat until the weather abates so you can go out and survey the damage.  It’s not the end of the world when you can’t travel anywhere as long as you’re prepared.

I once had to write a history class paper defending historians’ obsession with wars, crises, disasters.  It was an assignment that I disagreed with (some others drew the assignment to oppose that idea).  It was illuminating, because it turns out that a crisis forces issues to the surface that otherwise are ignored (example here, whether daily traffic deaths might be as high or higher as those attributed to Irene).  As I listened to WINS 1010 from the high ground of Denver and gleaned e-mails from family and friends who had electricity on the scene, I was able to learn a lot about the diverse transportation in the Irene regions that otherwise would not have been commented on.

As for the rural areas, they once had alternatives, too.  A friend of mine recently moved from a small town in eastern Colorado to an inner suburb of Denver.  She is mind-boggled by how much she is saving on transportation costs for everyday life.  Though she was not a commuter to the big city, even the most routine events like a trip to the library were costly.  Now, her autistic son is going places independently on buses, walking to stores, and her older son has less than half the miles to his suburban workplace.  50 years ago, their small town had all the same highways and county roads, but also had three buses a day between there and Denver, continuing on to the towns where the boys’ grandparents live.  The town also had a mail train stopping there on its way between Denver and Chicago.  And the train ran through all sorts of prairie weather disasters that closed the highways or made them risky to drive.  Sometimes the highway was open and the trains were stopped.

What the Irene story reminds us is that urban America is much better positioned to offer options to all sorts of people’s needs, while rural America has put all of its eggs in one basket (often by the policy choices of their own auto-oriented elected officials).  For those with different needs, leaving is the best choice.  For those preferring the hardy pioneer lifestyle as described by Matt BK, the lack of alternatives provides a good substitute for eugenics.